Another resurrection story

Do not seek death, death will find you.

But seek the road that makes death a fulfilment.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Another resurrection story. In the township of Nain

an only son joins Lazarus, and in time, Jesus himself.

(Let's be generous, and add the daughter of Jairus;

that makes four members of the resurrection guild.)

Perhaps the widow's son will outlive her, this time;

(this is the way things should be).

Then she will be spared the bitterness

of rekindled grief.

Another resurrection story,

but they are all really part of the one.

Death's ultimate conqueror

having come among us.

The ones who followed after him

eventually understood that bodily resurrections

have little use

beyond the postponement of grief.

Death however,

should be received as a divine gift.

Death's purpose is not found in its reversal

through resurrection,

but in the fulfilment of living.

© Ken Rookes 2016

Could Christ be telling us "You do not know the scriptures?"

From childhood most of us have known this passage, “Listen, Israel; the Lord our God is the one, only Lord and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, “You must love your neighbour as yourself’”. [Mark 12:29-31 New Jerusalem Bible] 

As with many of the texts that we have been taught, we have focused on some words and ignored others. The part in this passage where the scribe says that these commands are more important than all offerings and sacrifices has not been part of the learning of many Christians. Sacrificial offering often in the form of obedience, has been drummed into many as what God requires from us. We have seen this attitude reflected in the way people have taught their children up until recent generations. A woman in her late seventies spoke recently of how her father’s idea had been that there was only one thing for a child to learn and that was unquestioning obedience.

Love had not come into her childhood and she was still struggling with relationships with other people. She was taught that love said God expected her to offer herself and sacrifice herself completely for others. It was only recently that she had realised that Jesus had been saying that love for God, others and yourself was the most important thing and such sacrifice as she had lived left her resentful and often wasn’t showing love for self.

So we get to the story of Ruth, one of the best known from the Hebrew Scripture. Ruth has been held up to women and girls of countless generations as a saint, modelling the sacrificial behaviour required of women in Christian context. We were taught to see her as a paragon of virtue in her servility.

Could Christ be telling us, “You do not know the Scriptures?”  Could it be that Ruth was a feisty lass who knew her rights and was sticking with her mother-in-law in order to ensure that her children inherited what was due to them under the Jewish system? Or it might have been that Ruth clung to Naomi because she understood Ruth’s grief better than others because of their shared loss?

What are we to make of the bitterness of Naomi’s grief? It is of utmost importance for us to learn if we want to be reasonable pastoral carers that statements people make when distressed may not be facts and questions they ask may not reflect reality. When Jesus asked from the cross, “My God, why have you abandoned me?” he was not saying that God had abandoned him but that that was what it felt like. Naomi was expressing a similar thing when she named feeling bitter because “the hand of the Lord” had turned against her. [Ruth 1:13]

Most of us do not have the loss in our entire life times that Naomi has suffered. In all his loss, Job did not lose his wife. We knew someone whose wife and four children were killed coming home from school, in the Ash Wednesday fires. Can one ever recover from such devastation? And yet one must if one is to go on living. It takes many years to recover from dramatic loss.

Rev Julianne Parker
(for full sermon see sermons page)

Would that i had died ...

On hearing the news that Absalom was dead, David immediately retreated to a private place to mourn. His poignant words have rung and echoed through every generation since. “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you.” Unknown numbers of parents have uttered words like this as news came to them of the death of their sons and now daughters also, in war. In fact, almost every time a child dies, the parents express such words, “Would that I had died instead of you.”

The story goes on to say that the victory turned into mourning for all the troops who instead of celebrating joined the King in respect for his grief. But then the twist in the story came. Joab one of the army commanders had specifically disobeyed David’s orders in encouraging the soldiers to kill Absalom and he wasn’t about to put up with David’s response to news of the death. He told David in no uncertain terms that he was letting down the nation by mourning the one who had betrayed his father.

It is somewhat reminiscent of the Prime Minister of England going to the Queen in Scotland to tell her she had no right to be mourning as she was when Dianna died.

In the book of Job, we read of how his friends tried to tell him how to grieve and why he had brought all this trouble on himself.  Unfortunately today, people still try to tell others how they should mourn and remind them too early of major responsibilities.

It is almost natural to ask questions following a death, especially a sudden one. Why did this happen? What could I have done to prevent it? David must have wondered why the army officers had not done what he asked.

It is not only parents who say “Would that I had died instead of you”. They were my words when my husband died. He was such a loss to the community as well as our family and I was just his wife. In grief there is confusion, despair, unbearable agony. The thing that the story of David tells us is that no matter how bad it gets or how badly we handle our grief, God is still there for us, in it and through it.

Perhaps the words of Psalm 130 are also ones that you have uttered in desperation, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading.”  People who haven’t experienced major grief fail to understand. Many mean well with their advice but grief is a thing that you have to do for yourself for the most part, with the help of God.

Rev Julianne Parker (for full sermon see sermons page)

preferring darkness to the light

"...we can be critical of the Israelites as they wandered. We don’t actually know exactly how long it took them to reach their destination. Someone reminded me recently that it is a journey of less them a week on foot if you go directly from Egypt to the Promised Land. But when you are in the wilderness of grief, it can seem a long, long time and many times you wonder if you will ever make it to the other side. Like the Israelites, it can help us to have something held in front of us by a friend, to remind us that God still cares even when we feel we are being attacked on all sides. We can hang on to the knowledge of Christ and the message from the Gospel of John that God did not send Jesus to judge or to condemn us but to save us.

It is not at all unusual for grieving people to feel they are being condemned by others who think they should be over it or just forget about it and get on with their lives. People who have suffered loss do not need to be further traumatised by the use of Scripture that condemns them and seems to show God as harsh and uncaring.

It has been pointed out [Richard Rohr] that Jesus selectively emphasised texts that revealed his God as good, faithful, inclusive and merciful. And he created stories and healing events to communicate that point. Jesus consistently ignored passages that reveal God as punitive, exclusionary, imperialistic, small or tribal.  The Gospel reading set for today [John 3: 19-21] talks about people preferring darkness to the light which has come into the world. Concentrating on passages about God sending poisonous snakes is preferring darkness to the light which Jesus shines on God."
Rev Julianne Parker
(for full sermon see sermons page)

The mystery of Lazarus

The story of Lazarus is a mystery. Whatever Jesus did for him, he was not mentioned again in Scripture. What they witnessed failed to prepare the disciples for the rising of Jesus. If they had already witnessed a literal bringing back to life of Lazarus, why were they so surprised by Jesus?

It is much easier to look at the reading from Ezekiel. Things seen in visions are more likely to be metaphoric. We are not expected to literally believe that a great army of dried bones became alive, only that this symbolises the promise of God for the future of the people. It encourages us.

I was angry with God for not doing for me what Jesus did for Mary and Martha. People said, “You have lost your husband.” I would answer, Oh No! He is not lost. I know exactly where he is in the Naracoorte Cemetery. It is ME who am lost. I don’t know who I am. I wish I could die.” Sure, Jesus wept, but how long for? I wept for years; sometimes from sadness, sometimes from frustration or in anger.

The surprising thing was that it was me who came back to life. From being certain my life had ended with Ed’s death, it has been an extraordinary journey to life. It is my dried up bones that have had flesh put back on them and life breathed into them. The variety of things I have experienced has been immense. The journey from being the wife of a farmer in the Bangham Scrub to Bendigo has been rich and varied, immensely sad and ecstatically happy, incredibly interesting, sometimes troubling and painful but never dull.

This has in no small part, been due to coming to see God differently and as that happened I began to see others and myself differently. And It is not over yet. Romans 8:11 says, “God who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through God’s Spirit that lives in you.” It is also about seeing the Bible and stories contained in it, differently. I no longer need to cling on to it being literally true with grim death. Expanded understandings have been humbling, exciting and not always clarifying. I have learnt it is okay to say, we really don’t know what happened. We can only speculate and pray that if we have it wrong, God will help us to see it differently.

So what happened that day back there, two thousand years ago in Judea? I have no idea. What I do know is that given the opportunity, God weeps for a chance put flesh on our dried out bones and breathe life into our aching bodies. But be aware. It will be an amazing experience as I am sure, many of you already know.

Rev Julianne Parker

Pharaoh’s army got drownded; Oh Mary, don’t you weep!

Was it Mary of Bethany,

weeping for her dead brother?

Perhaps Mary of Magdala,

weeping in the garden for her dead master?

Or Mary the mother,

weeping for her crucified son

as he is lowered from his cross?

There are a lot of weeping Marys;

which one was the old song-writer

seeking to console?

Cheer up, Mary, he is saying;

if God can consign the army of Pharaoh

to such a watery destruction,

he can surely remedy

your own cause for grief.

There must have been much weeping

also in Egypt, according to the story

told by the Hebrew people.

Every family from Pharaoh down,

weeping for their slain firstborn.

And now, the mothers, wives and children

of the noble and loyal soldiers

swept away by the sea;

and Moses’ God.

Can you hear them?

Oh Mary, don’t you weep.

Certainly Miriam is not weeping

as she leads the Hebrew people

in song and dance triumph and joy.

Pharaoh’s army got drownded!

© 2011 Ken Rookes

Jesus wept

Jesus wept.

John 11:35

on white paper the words

are moved about urgently

but they refuse to function.

the horror is too great,

the grief too profound;

there can be no poem.

only questions;

impotent and inadequate.

the pain continues.

robbed of any power,

the words are dismissed;

let them remain unspoken,

let there be silence.

let tears and emptiness express

the aching and the mystery.

Ken Rookes.

Yes, even in the midst of Easter's joy there are those who experience anguish and grief. I post this poem in memory of my brother Neil.